ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Medieval Philosophy The Arabians Two notable philosophers among the Mohammedan Arabs of the Middle Ages must be mentioned here. These are Ibn-Sina (more commonly called by the Latinized form of his name Avicenna) and Ibn-Roschd (usually called Averroes). Avicenna (980-1037) was a native of Bokhara; his parents were Persian-born Arabians. He was a man of intellectual gifts.

A physician of renown as well as a philosopher, he is forever memorable for his book, The Canons of Medicine, which served for many years as the standard textbook for students of medical science. Averroes (d. 1198) was a Spanish=born Arab. He was a notable commentator on Aristotle as well as a distinguished thinker in his own right. The fact that the question of universals was of burning importance in the Middle Ages explains the enduring of these Arab names.

For the Arabians were deeply interested in the origin of ideas, and their theories touched the very heart of the controversy on universals. The true doctrine on ideas may be summed up thus: there are no inborn ideas; man acquires all his knowledge. Ideas result in man's intellect from the action of the mind on the findings of sense. From these ideas others may be worked out by a further process of abstraction.

So the mind rises from those ideas immediately formed upon sense-action (physical ideas) to concepts of pure quantity (mathematical ideas) and concepts of being considered apart from all the limitations of materiality (metaphysical ideas). In a word, ideas have their origin in the native power of the human mind or intellect to abstract understandable essences (called intelligible species) from sense-findings, and to hold these within itself as representations of reality.

Each human being has a mind or intellect. The intellect, in so far as it abstracts ideas (or intelligible species) from sense-findings (and from ideas already formed) is called the intellectus agens or active intellect; in so far as it expresses within itself the abstracted essences or intelligible species and holds these as representations of reality (thus knowing reality), it is called the intellectus possibilis or understanding intellect.

Now, the Arabians who followed Avicenna held the strange doctrine that there is a common intellectus agens for all men, jus as there is one sun in the sky to lend light to all eyes.